Reflections from a Target of the CIA: The Killing Machine

Bill Quigley

11 Jul 2007

Reflections from a Target of the CIA: The Killing Machine

by Fidel Castro

"Robert Kennedy personally controlled the operation for
the assassination of Fidel Castro."

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch.org.

Castro2
It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds
of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of
foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one
day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House
looked over the material.

The first
package of declassified documents goes by the name of "The Family
Jewels," it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and
1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions
that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders,
experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil
activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly
prohibited.

The
documents began to be gathered together 14 years after the first of the events
took place, when then CIA director, James Schlesinger became alarmed about what
the press was writing, especially all the articles by Robert Woodward and Carl
Bernstein published in The Washington Post, already mentioned in the
"Manifesto to the People of Cuba." The agency was being accused of
promoting spying in the Watergate Hotel with the participation of its former
agents Howard Hunt and James McCord.

"The agency was being accused of promoting spying in the
Watergate Hotel."

In May
1973, the Director of the CIA was demanding that "all the main operative
officials of this agency must immediately inform me on any ongoing or past
activity that might be outside of the constituting charter of this
agency". Schlesinger, later appointed Head of the Pentagon, had been
replaced by William Colby. Colby was referring to the documents as
"skeletons hiding in a closet". New press revelations forced Colby to
admit the existence of the reports to interim President Gerald Ford in 1975. The
New York Times was denouncing agency penetration of antiwar groups. The law
that created the CIA prevented it from spying inside the United States.

That
"was just the tip of the iceberg", said then Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger. Kissinger himself warned that "blood would flow" if other
actions were known, and he immediately added: "For example, that Robert
Kennedy personally controlled the operation for the assassination of Fidel
Castro" The President's brother was then Attorney General of the United States.
He was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968 elections,
which facilitated Nixon's election for lack of a strong candidate. The most
dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he had reached the conviction
that John Kennedy had been victim of a conspiracy. Thorough investigators,
after analyzing the wounds, the caliber of the shots and other circumstances
surrounding the death of the President, reached the conclusion that there had
been at least three shooters.

Solitary
Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have been the only shooter. I found
that rather striking. Excuse me for saying this but fate turned me into a
shooting instructor with a telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries.
I spent months practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a
stationary one. It disappears from view with each shot and so you need to look
for it all over again in fractions of a second.

"They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy."

Oswald
wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already been there
before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country's embassy in Mexico
but nobody knew him there so he wasn't authorized. They wanted to get us
implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby - a man openly linked to the
Mafia - unable to deal with so much pain and sadness, as he said, assassinated
him, of all places, in a precinct full police agents. Castro3

Subsequently,
in international functions or on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I
met with the aggrieved Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The
former president's son, who was a very small child when his father was killed,
visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.

The young
man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically died in an
airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to Martha's Vineyard with
his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue with any of those relatives. In
contrast, I pointed out that if the president-elect had then been Nixon instead
of Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster we would have been attacked by the
land and sea forces escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries
would have paid a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited
himself to saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For
the record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs adventure;
he was led there by Eisenhower's military reputation and the recklessness of
his ambitious vice-president.

"Cuba was the one
that would take the first strike"

I remember
that, exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a
peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean Daniel. He
told me that he was bringing a message from President Kennedy. He said to me
that in essence he had told him: "You are going to see Castro. I would
like to know what he thinks about the terrible danger we just experienced of a
thermonuclear war. I want to see you again as soon as you get back."
"Kennedy was very active; he seemed to be a political machine," he
added, and we were not able to continue talking as someone rushed in with the
news of what had just happened. We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought
was now pointless.

Certainly I
lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one that would
take the first strike, but we did not agree with the concessions that were made
to the United States. I have already spoken of this before.

Kennedy had
emerged from the crisis with greater authority. He came to recognize the
enormous sacrifices of human lives and material wealth made by the Soviet
people in the struggle against fascism. The worst of the relations between the
United States and Cuba had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn't
resigned himself to the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile
Crisis. The blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination
plots multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences
began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.

"We would have had much more time to reach, through
science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste."

After the
Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor would we
have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle for socialism.
Cuba would have never severed relations with the USSR as it had been asked to
do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware of what a war could be using
weapons of mass destruction they would have ended the Cold War earlier, and
differently. At least that's how we felt then, when there was still no talk of
global warming, broken imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and
the sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to the
youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through science and
conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.

President
Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central Intelligence
Agency. "We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve it," he said.

As a result
of the Commission's investigations that were led by Senator Frank Church,
President Ford signed an executive order which expressly prohibited the
participation of American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.

The
documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my
assassination.

Details are
also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at least seven
years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with the mission to
infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate "the international
activities of radicals and black militants". The Agency compiled more than
300,000 names of American citizens and organizations and extensive files on
7,200 persons.

According
to The New York Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American
anti-War movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he
ordered the CIA to produce evidence.

"The CIA spied on various journalists."

The
documents recognize, furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists
like Jack Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the
student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and carried
out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of human beings to
certain drugs.

In a
memorandum sent to Colby in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant
to John McCone, CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about
discussions in the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: "I
know that whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the
fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were transcribed.
During the McCone years there were microphones in his regular offices, the
inner office, the dining room, the office in the East building, and in the
study of his home on White Haven Street. I don't know if anyone is ready to
talk about this, but the information tends to be leaked, and certainly the
Agency is vulnerable in this case."

The secret
transcripts of the CIA directors could contain a great number of
"jewels". The National Security Archive is already requesting these
transcripts.

A memo
clarifies that the CIA had a project called OFTEN which would collect
"information about dangerous drugs in American companies," until the
program was terminated in the fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports
that manufacturers of commercial drugs "had passed" drugs to the CIA
which had been "refused due to adverse secondary effects."

castro4
As part of
the MKULTRA program, the CIA had given LSD and other psycho-active drugs to
people without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive,
Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency Mind
Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having made available
the poison that was going to be used in the assassination attempt on Patrice
Lumumba.

CIA
employees assigned to MHCHAOS, the operation that carried out surveillance on
American opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents, expressed
"a high level of resentment" for having been ordered to carry out
such missions. Nonetheless, there is a series of interesting matters revealed
in these documents, such as the high level at which the decisions for actions
against our country were taken.

The
technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the
unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use of
computers. For
The New York Times, large censored sections reveal that the CIA still
cannot expose all the skeletons in its closets, and many activities developed
in operations abroad, checked over years ago by journalists, congressional
investigators and a presidential commission, are not in the documents.

Howard
Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the
"jewels" compiled by his office. He lists eight cases including the
recruiting of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro but
they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn's initial
list: two and a half pages.

"Many activities developed in operations abroad, checked
over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential
commission, are not in the documents."

"The
No.1 Jewel of the CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the
second one is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro
by Roselli," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security
Archive who requested the declassification of "The Family Jewels" 15
years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.

It is notable
that the administration which has declassified the least information in the
history of the United States, and which has even started a process of
reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the
decision to make these revelations.

I believe
that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency
when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity,
and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use.
When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said:
"The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very
different Agency."

Needless to
say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal
manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions
within the very United States.

The New
York Times wrote
that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the revelation of the
documents is an attempt to distract attention from recent controversies and
scandals plaguing the CIA and an Administration that is living through some of
its worst moments of unpopularity.

The
declassification could also be an attempt at showing, in the early stages of
the electoral process that the Democratic administrations were as bad, or
worse, than Mr. Bush's.

In pages 11
to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can
read:

"In
August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with
the objective of determining whether the Security Office had agents who could
help in a confidential mission that required gangster-style action. The target
of the mission was Fidel Castro.

"Given
the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only to a small
group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was informed
and he gave it his approval. Colonel J.C. King, Head of the Western Hemisphere
Division, was also informed, but all the details were deliberately concealed
from officials of Operation JMWAVE. Even though some officials of
Communications (Commo) and the Technical Services Division (TSD) took part in
initial planning phases, they were not aware of the mission's purpose.

"Robert
A. Maheu was contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and
he was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type elements
as a first step for achieving the desired goal.

"Mr.
Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several
occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him informally
through clients, but he had been told that he was a member of the upper
echelons of the 'syndicate' and that he was controlling all the ice machines on
the Strip. In Maheu's opinion, if Roselli was in effect a member of the Clan,
he undoubtedly had connections that would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.

"They were convinced that the elimination of Castro would
be a solution to their problem."

"Maheu
was asked to get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations
executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him that
recently he had been contracted by a client who represented several
international business companies, which were suffering enormous financial
losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the elimination of
Castro would be a solution to their problem and they were ready to pay $150,000
for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be made perfectly aware of the fact
that the U.S. government knew nothing, nor could it know anything, about this
operation.

"This
was presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of New
York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved, but after
Maheu's persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a friend, Sam Gold,
who knew "some Cubans.". Roselli made it clear that he didn't want any
money for his part in all this, and he believed that Sam would do likewise.

Neither of
these people was ever paid with Agency money.

"During
the week of September 25, Maheu was introduced to Sam who was living at the
Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was not until several weeks after
meeting Sam and Joe who was introduced as courier operating between Havana and
Miami - that he saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade.
They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante,
respectively. Both were on the Attorney General's list of the ten most wanted.
The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in Chicago and Al
Capone's heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban operations of the Cosa
Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office upon learning this information.

"After
analyzing the possible methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that
they not resort to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of
deadly pill, something to be put into Castro's food or drink, this would be a
much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible candidate
in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been receiving bribery
payments in the gambling racket, and who still had access to Castro and was in
a financial bind.

"The
TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal
pills".

"Joe
delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta appears to
have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission. He suggested
another candidate who made several unsuccessful."

Everything
that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe well, dear
readers, the methods that were already being used by the United States to rule
the world.

I remember
that during the early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National
Institute for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name
was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He was a
respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The decades have gone by
and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I can't lay my hands on
information to immediately prove what happened to him. Accept my apologies if I
involuntarily have offended a relative or a descendent, whether the person I
have mentioned is guilty or not.

The empire
has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only of the CIA and
its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive intelligence and
security super-structures, and he has transformed all the air, sea and land
forces into instruments of world power that take war, injustice, hunger and
death to any part of the globe, in order to educate its inhabitants in the
exercise of democracy and freedom. The American people are gradually waking up
to this reality.

"You
cannot fool all of the people all of the time," said Lincoln.

Fidel Castro need no introduction.

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